honestly whenever fridging wank goes around the thing that i'm always thinking about is that like. i think that since fridging as a term/concept has colloquially come to mean "any specific individual circumstance in which a bad thing in a narrative happens to a woman character in service of a male character's story that's fundamentally about him and not her" (which, not hating, because that's usually how i use it too), it's also how over time the term fridging has been able to be softened and warped into "any individual bad thing that happens to any character in service to another character's narrative rather than their own/that's not about them" as the focus has become played on individual circumstance of a bad thing happening, rather than the initial focus which is "frequency in which bad things happen to women vs men in fiction"
because fridging was never meant to be about individual stories--in fact, it says it on the front page of her website: "An important point: This isn't about assessing blame about an individual story or the treatment of an individual character and it's certainly not about personal attacks on the creators who kindly shared their thoughts on this phenomenon. It's about the trend, its meaning and relevance, if any. Plus, it's just fun to talk about refrigerators with dead people in them. I don't know why."
the point of fridging is to ask if there's a trend of putting woman characters in the wood chipper more frequently, or worse, compared to their male counterparts. and if there is (there is) then why (because they're women).
gail simone also wasn't necessarily trying to say that women should never be sacrificed for the narrative, or used as a narrative tool for a male character, either. she's a comic writer. she's in the bad things happen to people genre. she's well aware of genre coventions and on her site you can tell she's well aware that sometimes, for the story, women are sacrified and she doesn't seem to particularly mind so long as it's done thoughtfully. she was definitely annoyed by it, as evidenced by her response to a letter in the "emails as of 5/26/99" section in the responses portion of the WIR website:
"GS: Wow, Donna. Quite a letter. Okay, here's my chance to say something I've been meaning to for a while. These are adventure/action stories we're talking about. If women are in these stories as major players, then the typical fates suffered by male characters (being beat up or shot at) SHOULD happen to females as well. No one at the WiR site has any problem with women characters suffering the standard elements of drama.
a) The female characters are shown ONLY as victims or hostages,
b) Female characters with long histories are casually tossed aside while male characters of equal stature don't seem to be at a similar rate,
c) A beloved female character is killed/depowered/tortured/whatever purely for shock value, for the effect it produces on a male character. This is a pretty tiresome ploy no matter what gender the victim is, but I think most will agree it happens to women more than men.
There are a few other annoying plot contrivances that seem to be directed more at women, but those are my personal pet peeves. Supergirl getting beat up in a fight doesn't bother me."
which, i agree with her there. those things reek of bad writing--but she's also, again, more focused on the frequency aspect of women compared to men being affected by that kind of bad writing rather than tying fridging as a concept specifically to individual circumstances where that bad writing happens. because what fridging is really concerned with is--is there a frequency, specifically happening to women, there, and should we do something about it (we should).
anyways i just kind of see how it gets devolved over time when the focus is "this bad thing happened to a woman in service of a man" because that slippery slope slides into "this bad thing happened to a character only to serve another character's purpose" given the thought it's the lack of agency or serving another character's narrative that's the main problem (when the truth is that while that's definitely part of the problem, it's not actually the main focus of the concept) rather than on "is there a frequency problem of bad things happening to women in media" (the original question).
